“You can suddenly have large groups being highly engaged in the governance of the systems. I love using Minecraft as an example because with Minecraft you can have your own economies you can have your own sort of goals or strategies or community guidelines and you can modify things to the point that it is something very unique and fun for your communities. DAOs allow you to do that outside of the gaming space. It is kind of like Minecraft for the world. You grew up taking your ideas of governance and economies and storytelling and interactions and community and you prototype them in Minecraft now what do they do now that they are in college and they are graduating? Now they are inventing and championing DAOs and I am not surprised cause they are taking that same way of thinking in a decentralised story space”.

Amelia Winger-Bearskin

In this episode of A Correction, I speak with Amelia Winger-Bearskin about what is meant by the metaverse, why it is not a new concept, and how Decentralisation and Autonomous Organisations are helping the metaverse to develop. She also explains why artists need to make money, the work that goes into creating NFTs, and the way gaming supports the metaverse. Amelia discusses how today’s generation is more interested in co-creating their own stories than listening to just one broadcast and explains how indigenous storytelling and other indigenous and artistic influences can support a sustainable world online, for example through non-linear intergenerational storytelling and engaging with the dream world in the virtual space. She also talks about how coders can work with others to build an ethical metaverse. Listen to this episode on the A Correction podcast website, Apple Podcast, Spotify, or any other podcast channel.

Biography

Amelia Winger-Bearskin is an artist of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) origin who innovates with artificial intelligence in ways that make a positive impact on our communities and the environment. She is a Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Chair and Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Arts, at the Digital Worlds Institute at the University of Florida. She is also the inventor of Honor Native Sky, and founded the award winning podcast Wampum.Codes an ethical framework for software development based on indigenous values of co-creation. She was awarded a MacArthur/Sundance Institute fellowship for her collaborative 360 video immersive installation and has been awarded other prestigious prizes for her VR/AR projects.

Recent research has found that 97% of palaeontological data come from scientists in countries classified as high- and upper-middle-income countries and this can lead to a misunderstanding of the history of life.

Scientists in Europe and North America contribute most fossil data … and a lot of those fossils come from other countries.

Sources

Callaway (2022) How rich countries skew the fossil record in Nature

Raja et al (2021) Colonial history and global economics distort our understanding of deep-time biodiversity, Nature Ecology and Evolution

In this episode of A Correction I speak to Prof. Donald Grinde Jr., who testified before the US congress about why and how Native American principles of democracy directly informed the American democratic system, including the American constitution, federalism, setting up a system of separate judicial, legislative branches that have distinct powers, and the concept of sovereignty as invested in the people. The US Congress has officially recognised this influence. Also see (Iroquois Confederacy of Nations: Hearing before the Select Committee on Indian Affairs United States Senate). Monarchy rule in Europe at the time was not found suited for the new American context and Native American principles such as those of the Iroquois Confederacy was the form of democracy the founding fathers were most familiar with in their local interactions. He also talks about how this system influenced the change from monarchy rule to democracy in France. This influence has been outlined extensively in various documents by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington as well as by European philosophers like John Locke and Montesquieu among others. He also talks about women rights and environmental rights in Native American culture, and the influence of Native American food and ecology globally.

Listen on the A Correction podcast website, Apple podcast, Spotify or any of the usual podcast stations.

Professor Donald Grinde Jr

Professor Grinde is a member of the Yamassee Nation, whose research and teaching have focused on Haudenosaunee/Iroquois history, U.S. Indian policy since 1871, Native American thought, and environmental history. He has written extensively on these topics, including authoring or co-authoring books such as “the Encyclopedia of Native American Biography,” “Apocalypse of Chiokoyhikoy, Chief of the Iroquois”, “The Iroquois and the Founding of the American Nation,” “Exemplar of Liberty: Native America and the Evolution of Democracy,” “Ecocide of Native America: Environmental Destruction of Indian Lands and Peoples.” His work on environmental issues has also included studying the 16th and 17th century ecological history of a portion of the Susquehanna River, and serving as co-principal investigator on a National Science Foundation-funded graduate student training program focused on solving environmental problems in Western New York. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Africana and American Studies at the University of Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences.

“… we can think about what can be the supreme end, the final end or ethical perfection for AI ethics … we want to be able to get clear guidelines for AI ethics and with the final end in sight” 

Prof. Soraj Hongladarom

In this issue of A Correction podcast I speak with Prof Soraj Hongladarom who explains why a clear vision or guidelines for AI ethics should be conceptualised with a final end in sight – ending the suffering of interdependent and connected sentient beings (or reaching nirvana), even if it takes a long time or is not achieved. He talks about how Buddhist philosophy related to justice, accountability and compassion can support ethical development of AI that supports common moral human values around the world. He explains how this can be cultivated by those developing AI and maps not only differences but similarities between Buddhist and Greek philosophy in this regard.

Soraj considers the concept of the ‘self’ vs the ‘non-self’ in developing AI, the importance of privacy and interrogates the concept of intellectual property rights. He also talks about his contribution to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems which considers how different philosophical traditions such as Buddhism, Confucianism, African Ubuntu traditions, and Japanese Shinto can support ethical digital technology and what is meant by ‘machine enlightenment’.

Listen on the A Correction Podcast website, Spotify, Apple Podcast or all the usual podcast channels.

Professor Soraj Hongladarom is professor of philosophy and Director of the Center for Ethics of Science and Technology at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. He has published books and articles on diverse issues such as bioethics, computer ethics, and the roles that science and technology play in the culture of Eastern countries. His concern is mainly on how science and technology can be integrated into the life-world of people in the so-called ‘Third World’ countries, and what kind of ethical considerations can be obtained from such relations. A large part of this question concerns how information technology is integrated in the lifeworld of the Thai people, and especially how such integration is expressed in the use of information technology in education. He is the editor, together with Charles Ess, of Information Technology Ethics: Cultural Perspectives, published by IGI Global. His works have also appeared in Bioethics, The Information Society, AI & Society, Philosophy in the Contemporary World, and Social Epistemology, among others.

“Mathematics is all around us, it is in the numbers we use, it’s in the patterns our mothers use in weaving it’s in the architecture of our homes, it’s in the symbolism that we use for divination and healing, so a child growing up wherever they are growing up has a natural exposure to mathematics but they may not know that what they are seeing is mathematical until you show them how it relates to the abstract concepts”

Prof. Nkechi Madonna Agwu

I wish I had a math teacher like Professor Agwu when I was growing up! In this very inspiring episode of A Correction I spoke to Professor Nkechi Madonna Agwu, a mathematician who does amazing work teaching mathematics informed by indigenous methods. We discuss how she grew up seeing mathematics all around her and how her experience of civil war and growing up in 3 refugee camps taught her essential mathematical skills. She also emphasises the importance of science, technology, engineering and mathematics role models for girls.

Professor Agwu speaks about how she uses Ndebe dolls inspired by the inherently mathematical Ndebe tribe in Africa to teach mathematics, computer science and robotics, by combining history, culture, art, storytelling, geography, entrepreneurship, commerce, environmental protection and recycling. She also uses the African Okwe or Mancala game, the oldest known game in the world, which is similar to Chess, to teach mathematical concepts, such as symmetry, graph theory, geometry etc. These teaching methods are basically free, created by being resourceful and using materials around us.

She explains how learning mathematics in indigenous languages supports mathematical learning, how teaching intergenerationally and multiculturally improves education and society at large and explains how even though teaching face-to-face cannot be replaced by technology, technology can be used to strengthen mathematical learning.

Listen to the podcast on A Correction Podcast, Spotify, Apple Podcast and the usual podcast stations.

Professor Nkechi Madonna Agwu has taught mathematics for over 30 years in Nigeria and the United States. She is a Professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC), City University of New York (CUNY). She is a generalist, in that her research, teaching, and scholarship intersects with the sciences, arts, social sciences, and humanities. She is a recipient of a Carnegie Africa Diaspora Fellowship, and the Founder of CHI STEM TOYS Foundation, an NGO geared towards facilitating STEM and entrepreneurship education among under-represented groups of people, particularly girls and women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM), and in rural and vulnerable communities in Africa.

“We have a traditional belief that if you interact with somebody or touch an object part of your spirituality … is part of that new object … In the wisdom world academics and data scientists will say well that doesn’t actually apply to you because we have anonymised the data, the data isn’t actually about you … Māori would say it is a eurocentric perspective of data because we believe that data still has part of us and anyone else inside that data”

Dr. Karaitiana Taiuru

In this episode of A Correction Podcast I speak with Dr. Karaitiana Taiuru about how he came to develop the world’s first Indigenous ethics guidelines for Artificial Intelligence, Algorithms, Data and Internet of Things. He explains how he has been able to work with the New Zealand government and academia to support this. The complexity of Māori, Data as Taonga, Tikanga Māori, and the Māori Sovereignty Guidelines are also discussed. He encourages incorporating indigenous culture and epistemologies into the new digital world through older generations working with younger generations. He explains how Māori culture and other indigenous cultures can inform Artificial Intelligence, that supports environmental sustainability and equality.

Listen on A Correction Podcast, Apple Podcast, Spotify or all the usual podcast platforms.

Dr. Karaitiana Taiuru is an interdisciplinary Māori academic activist who works on Artificial Intelligence ethics and colonisation, data sovereignty; genomic ethics; property rights & Tikanga Māori. He coined the term “Digital Colonialism” and has played a leading role in focusing Maori in modern technology. He is the author of the world’s first Indigenous ethics guidelines for AI, Algorithms, Data and the Internet of Things and the author of a major ICT/Social media Dictionary of the Māori Language with over 375,000 translations. He also created the first electronic Māori Dictionary Te Reo Tupu, a compilation of all major dictionaries and helped to ensure that Māori could be written on computers and the web and has developed Māori language tools and a myriad of publications.

“The coder has a role, but the coder is not an artist, unless they are … so there are artists who code and then there are coders who are interested in the arts, but there is an artistic process, a creative process that artists go through that software engineers don’t know, just like there are coding processes happening with a machine that artists don’t know… so there has to be some collaboration between the two …“

Dr. Nettrice Gaskins

In this episode of A Correction Podcast I speak with Dr. Nettrice Gaskins about the future of art and artificial intelligence (AI). She talks about how she uses second life to exhibit art, how virtual reality and augmented reality can support artists, and traces the history of virtual reality and augmented reality technology use by artists. Nettrice explains how artists are using machine learning and collaborating with AI to create art and to make music. She talks about how artists should collaborate with technologists and curators in the future to hone and develop their craft explaining that even with machine learning the artist will guide the artistic process. Nettrice discusses Afrofuturism in her art and talks about how art can improve data science. She also discusses the impact of algorithmic bias and talks about the more complex issues that emerge related to intellectual property rights when using these types of technologies for artistic creation, that artists should be aware of.

Listen on A Correction Podcast, Apple Podcast, Spotify and all the usual podcast platforms

Dr. Nettrice R. Gaskins is an African American digital artist, academic, cultural critic and advocate of STEAM fields. In her work she explores “techno-vernacular creativity” and Afrofuturism. Dr. Gaskins’ work explores how to generate art using algorithms in different ways, especially through coding. She also teaches, writes, “fabs” or makes, and does other things. She has taught multimedia, computational media, visual art, and even Advanced Placement Computer Science Principles with high school students who majored in the arts. She earned a BFA in Computer Graphics with Honors from Pratt Institute in 1992 and an MFA in Art and Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1994. She received a doctorate in Digital Media from Georgia Tech in 2014. She has taught at the secondary and post-secondary levels in the Boston Public Schools and at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Currently, Dr. Gaskins is the assistant director of the Lesley STEAM Learning Lab at Lesley University. She will publish her first full-length book through The MIT Press.

This post is republished from the Shaping Interdisciplinary Practices in Europe Project (SHAPE-ID) website. SHAPE-ID is an EU-funded project addressing the challenge of improving interdisciplinary cooperation between the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (AHSS) and STEM (Sciences, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and other disciplines.

by Keisha Taylor Wesselink – Research Fellow (SHAPE-ID)

The labyrinth is something that you cannot help entering. Once inside it, you have no idea where you are, you feel lost, you are robbed of a sense of direction, but perhaps that does not matter. You will never see the whole design, but you can live with that. There are terrors within the labyrinth but there is also love. The centre may not be where you think it is or where you want it to be. But humans desire pattern and shape and design. They spin thread, they tell stories, they build structures. There is meaning to be made, meaning to be excavated.

Charlotte Higgens author of Red Thread: On Mazes and Labyrinths

Flat labyrinth by Joachim Aspenlaub Blattboldt

I first came to ‘interdisciplinarity’ as a subject when I studied for an MSc and a PhD in Web Science. However, in essence I was a practitioner long before I ever used the term. Indeed, many of us are, even if we don’t give it the name. For what should underlie and inform interdisciplinarity is courage, curiosity, creativity and reflection. It should be characterised by mutual respect, co-creation, trusted, equal and diverse partnerships. Interdisciplinarity should aim to uncover new ways of looking at the world, identify problems, find solutions and rethink impact to benefit our shared humanity. The modern concept of a ‘discipline’ is relatively new, dating to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Given the complexity of the interconnectedness of our problems we must rethink how we teach and do research, drawing inspiration from the past and all cultures.

This idea of interdisciplinarity is evident in my work on technology policy, internet governance, open and big data with people from the technology, business, non-profit and government worlds. This can be seen in my work which focuses on supporting communities to take asset-based approaches, and my experience working in multicultural London and Trinidad and Tobago. For me, interdisciplinarity and the freedom to go beyond boundaries should lie at the heart of research and education. Despite persisting obstacles, I would hazard a guess that many academics and teachers wish for this as well.

Interdisciplinary as a term as well as its meaning has also evolved for me as a practicing Web Scientist as I now study it as a mode of knowledge production in its own right for the SHAPE-ID project. Indeed, we needed this work not today, but yesterday! In 2006 the Web Science Doctoral Training programme was launched at the University of Southampton with recognition that anyone from any discipline, for example, history, philosophy, computer science, anthropology, sociology, politics, chemistry, math … and the list goes on … would benefit from having in-depth knowledge of the web and the internet as a sociotechnical structure.  Training in inter- transdisciplinary approaches was essential for helping us to anticipate, understand and address opportunities and challenges that arise with web use. In 2006 Facebook was also newly created. Back then, there was no Twitter, WhatsApp, Spotify, Airbnb and Instagram. Amazon was not what it is now and many of the businesses we engage with that rely on these technologies simply did not exist. The pace of technological growth is mind boggling and artificial intelligence solutions are accelerating.

We all enjoy the convenience and speed of global communication today. Yet we also live in a world of misinformation, cyber threats and political and economic destabilisation. Even more challenging times exist and lie ahead. All of this is unravelling in real time, in the midst of a global environmental crisis, a global COVID-19 pandemic and rising levels of inequality. The pandemic has revealed just how fragile and interconnected our systems are. It also laid bare just how much we rely on the technologies that connect us.

Too many of us reason that our problems are ‘just too difficult to deal with’ … ‘we are powerless’ … ‘let’s deal with this another day’. I dare to hope. I challenge myself to dig deep and side with optimism by deciding we can work together to do better. We can go beyond boundaries to understand and tackle our interconnected issues, crafting a human story that benefits all in the process. As the pandemic shows and our historians will explain, these issues have not gone away. They come back time and time again, forcing us to look at ourselves. Forcing us to look in the mirror, again.

There is beauty in myriad types of collaborative and integrative research in spite of divisive names like interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and cross-disciplinary. Lest we forget, there is also power in doing away with labels. Our linguists can explain the varied and powerful meanings embedded in the language we use which can also constrain us. We must allow for serendipity and synchronicity. We must benefit from the imagination and humanity courted by the arts, humanities and social sciences to understand, explore and address issues emerging from our research.

It is against this backdrop of my own experience that I have been tasked with developing a taxonomy and shared language for the integration of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (AHSS) disciplines and with Science Technology Engineering, Math and Medicine (STEMM) disciplines. My research on interdisciplinary classification systems, including taxonomies, frameworks and typologies has been informative. My work will be underwritten by the very rich SHAPE-ID research project data (an extensive literature review, surveys, interviews and the findings from some very revealing workshops). This taxonomy will be designed to help not just AHSS and STEMM researchers, but policymakers, funders, universities, other academic institutes, cultural institutions, enterprise, civil society organisations and other users. I provide just a few scenarios that the taxonomy aspires to cover:

Researcher

You have the opportunity to do interdisciplinary work, but you have no idea where to start.

• Find out what you need and how you can be supported.

Universities

You support inter- and transdisciplinary research opportunities for Arts and Humanities researchers but there is not as much uptake as you would like.

• Find out how your university can be more supportive.

Policymaker

You do not fully understand how Arts and Humanities disciplines can contribute to a project that is very STEMM focused but you want to include AHSS researchers. There are no examples of what to do.

• Learn why it is important and how you can support their involvement.

Funder

You are not sure how a funding call can be structured and evaluated to encourage AHSS participation in IDR/TDR.

• Find out more about structuring funding calls and improving evaluation.

Enterprise

You would like to do more work with AHSS researchers but you are unsure about where to start.

• Find out more about working with academia.

Citizens

You would like to include citizens in your work and IDR/TDR assessment.

• Learn more about including citizens.

These are just some of the issues being mapped and navigated for the inter- and transdisciplinary maze or labyrinth each stakeholder group can encounter. I hope the maps lead us to each other, to reassess impact and find solutions together, some of which we would never have imagined otherwise. I end with the passage below. It conjures memories of wanderings on the island of Ireland, and special weekly coffee mornings at the Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute at Trinity College, Dublin, where I am based for this project.

Let’s navigate the maze. Let’s persist in exploring ways through our labyrinth.

… that mazes are in relation to directions what betwixts-and-betweens are in relation to opposites. In passing through a maze one is not going in any particular direction, and by so doing one reaches a destination which cannot be located by reference to the points of the compass. According to Irish folk-belief, fairies and other supernatural beings can cause a man to lose his bearings…it is when the voyagers have lost their course and shipped their oars – when they are not going anywhere – that they arrive in the wondrous isles.’

Alwyn Rees and Brinley Rees – Celtic Heritage: Ancient Tradition in Ireland and Wales (346)

Dr Keisha Taylor-Wesselink is a Research Fellow on the SHAPE-ID project at the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute, Trinity College Dublin, where she is developing a taxonomy and shared language to support collaboration between and integration of the Arts, Humanities and Social Science (AHSS) disciplines with Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths and Medicine (STEMM) disciplines. She also started Techilosophy to explore the ways contemporary and alternative culture and phenomena, especially from indigenous cultures and the Global South, can aid understanding and development of science and technology. She has an MSc (with distinction) and a PhD in Web Science from the University of Southampton, an MA in International Relations from the Universiteit van Amsterdam and a BSc in Sociology from the University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago.